FontLab is both the name of a company, Fontlab Ltd, Inc. and the name of their flagship font editor product. Since the early 2000s, FontLab has been the dominant software tool for commercial/retail digital font development. This is partly because the once-dominant Fontographer by Altsys ceased development after its acquisition by Macromedia. During Macromedia's merger/acquisition by Adobe Systems in 2005, Macromedia sold Fontographer's rights and code to FontLab Ltd, so FontLab now owns and maintains both of the most popular font editing/development tools.
History
Originally, there were two separate companies. SoftUnion Ltd of Saint Petersburg, Russia, made the software, under lead programmerYuri Yarmola. Pyrus North America Ltd, of the USA was formed in 1992 to distribute and market FontLab 2.0 for Microsoft Windows, which came out in 1993. Eventually Pyrus bought all the rights to FontLab, hired Mr. Yarmola, and then restructured as Fontlab Ltd., Inc. Today they have a wide range of font editing and conversion tools. The company is distributed, but programming is still done primarily by a Russian team, partly in St. Petersburg, while the company is incorporated in Panama. FontLab's first Mac OS product was FontLab 3 for Mac, in 1998. Since then, FontLab has been issued for both Mac and Windows. Although initially Windows versions always came first, with FontLab VI the two versions have become in sync, with simultaneous releases. In addition, FontLab has developed spinoff font editors for specific markets. TypeTool, a simplified version of FontLab Studio, is quite inexpensive and serves as an entry leveltypeface editor, which is popular with students, hobbyists, and those whose typographic needs are relatively simple. In the past, AsiaFont Studio was a more sophisticated version of Fontlab, with special features for editing Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts. These functions are now included in Fontlab Studio since version 5.1. OpenType features for complex scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, and Thai are not directly supported, but can be added through . At a time when fonts came in different formats and were platform-specific, FontLab also began to create a line of font creation and conversion utilities. ScanFont, a tool for converting scans and bitmaps of glyphs into vector glyphs was part of FontLab 2, but in the next version it was split off, and became a stand-alone application. With FontLab VI, the ScanFont functionality was again integrated into the main application. Next came TransType, a font converter for moving fonts between TrueType, OpenType and Type 1 formats and between Macintosh and Windows platforms. A few shorter-lived and more specialized font converters followed: FONmaker, for converting vector fonts into bitmaps; FontFlasher, for converting “normal” vector fonts into pixelated vector fonts for low-resolution display in Flash apps; and FogLamp, for converting native Fontographer files into modern formats.
AsiaFont Studio – font editor for professional typeface designers of CJK fonts, or other fonts with exceptionally large glyph counts. Its functions were rolled into FontLab Studio 5.1 and later.
